We spend Christmas Eve at my mom’s. She cooks dinner, we eat, exchange presents, then we come home.
We were supposed to be there at four in the afternoon. We showed up at 4:15. Mom said she thought we’d be there at five. No, four was the time.
Anyway, my mom wasn’t acting right. She’d sounded fine on the phone, but Sunday night, there was something obviously wrong with her. Her hands were freezing, she wasn’t doing anything in the kitchen. The turkey was in the oven, but nothing else was getting prepared. Her hands were freezing (her place was an oven). I warmed her hands up with mine and then went into the kitchen to finish dinner. She didn’t know where anything was.
I did find an empty pack of cigarettes in the trash bag she had hanging from one of the cupboard pulls. It was right there on top, ashes next to it. I asked her about it, she denied it was hers. There have been a few times she’s had the smell of tobacco on her, but she blamed it on a neighbor.
She had a couple of beers, I had some champagne. Brian had one glass, that was his limit. The turkey was taken out of the oven to cool down and I started the peas, mashed the potatoes and heated up the gravy.
Mom would walk into a room and just stand there. “What am I doing?” she’d ask. And she was walking like it really hurt.
I was frightened that she’d gotten so bad in such a short period of time. I thought maybe it was her medications.
When we left, Brian said we’d take the carcass and put it in our dumpster, he didn’t want her bothering with it. We said our goodbyes.
Brian told me yesterday morning that mom was drunk on her ass. And thinking back on it, that made more sense. When I called her, I asked her about it. She said that she’d maybe had a few beers too many. Oh, and she was smoking again.
All the concern I had for her Christmas Eve just flew out the window. Cigarettes mess with one’s taste buds, so that food doesn’t taste good. They screw with the circulatory system so that blood doesn’t flow like it should. They also contribute to high blood pressure. Her doctor recently doubled her dose of meds because they couldn’t get her BP regulated.
She remembered nothing of the night before.
Add to that the drinking (the black out) and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. It terrifies me that she’ll have too much to drink and burn the place down with a cigarette or take a bad fall and seriously injure herself or die.
I can’t be her policeman. I don’t want to be her policeman, but I don’t want her to be in a position where she has to live in a home because she can’t take care of herself. I told her this this morning on the phone. She did tell me that she had taken two traquilizers Sunday afternoon because she was “feeling hyper”. Mom doesn’t like taking these things, because she feels like she’s losing control. WTF does drinking too much make her feel, then?
Anyway, she said she got rid of the beer she had and was going to try to quit smoking again. She’s got the lozenges, so she can start on them until she gets the patches.
I was so very proud of her and I don’t want her to hasten the end of her life. I like having her around.
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